Truthfully, McCain in wrong Pravda

Sen. John McCain got his wish when his op-ed against Russian President Vladimir Putin was published in Russia news outlet Pravda. The only problem — it may have been the wrong Pravda.

The Arizona Republican published his anti-Putin piece on Pravda.ru on Thursday, an English and Russian news website that was founded in 1999.

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But McCain said he was hoping to publish in the Communist newspaper Pravda, meaning “truth” in Russian, which was founded in 1912. That publication, after being banned when the Soviet Union collapsed, was rekindled and is still circulated by today’s Russian Communist Party.

Pravda.ru and the paper are unrelated media outlets, except for the name.

On Thursday, a spokesman for McCain said the senator submitted the op-ed to both publications and hoped both would run it. He denied Pravda.ru is the “wrong” Pravda.

On Sunday, McCain told reporters that the Communist one was the Pravda he hoped would publish his piece, but that publication’s editor wrote in a statement that the publication would not accept McCain’s op-ed unless it aligned with their position supporting the Syrian regime, according to CNN.

McCain’s critical op-ed on Pravda.ru, titled “Russians deserve better than Putin,” was a response to Putin’s own piece in The New York Times last week criticizing American exceptionalism and arguing against action in Syria. McCain is a longtime critic of Putin and an active supporter of U.S. intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition.

For its part, the chairman of Pravda.ru’s board of directors wrote a column on Monday defending Pravda.ru as one of two legitimate successors of the original Pravda, saying his site is “the absolute leader among Russian English-language media, with the exception of Russia Today.”

The chairman said they were happy to publish McCain’s piece, even if it goes against the publication’s position on Syria, to promote discussion of the complicated issue, and that they agreed to do so after being approached by Foreign Policy with McCain’s public statement that he wanted to write in Pravda.